Going Home
by Kyuunen
Summary: The battle is over. Where can Vincent go now if home is just a fuzzy memory? FallingApart!Vincent, possible interpretation of VincentxYuffie, Vincent POV


Disclaimer: No, I don't own Final Fantasy VII. It belongs to them Square folks.

Alright, so here's my first fic featuring Vincent, as well as the first complete fic with hints at YuffiexVincent, as mild as they are. Hope you guys like it! And just so you know, Vincent's demons don't really feature prominently in this, like in many others' fics. Sorry.

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**Going Home** _by KyuuketsukiShounen_

If I close my eyes, the cheering sounds like screaming, muffled and filling my ears. I keep my eyes shut until the sweat drips down my brow and I can't take it anymore and I have to open them to make sure there are no needles in my arm and there is no sound coming from my own mouth.

Our journey. It's all over. A part of me feels numb to it. When we rode the airship here as Holy and the Lifestream receded back into the dark, I said nothing and turned my back on the sight. I'm sure that they expected me to be silent. They probably think I don't care at all about this mission. I suppose that's alright with me. Yes, they can think I'm a cruel-hearted bastard who has nothing but his own problems to concern him. After all, soon we will all be back to our respective homes, lives filed carefully away in lands separated by oceans, far apart from each other. And the thought of this makes my chest tighten and ache but then I pretend we're back in the middle of a field on the way to Junon or Rocket Town and then it's not that bad.

I wonder if I should be ashamed to wish we weren't all diverging from the path. I know it's selfish. But inside me I almost wish... that Sephiroth were still alive so we could all be together. Just a little longer.

I brush these thoughts away as brusquely as I can. Heat rises to my cheeks. These are just romanticized ideas, the same ideas that killed me before. I'll just forget. Forget everything.

I wait for the demons to laugh at me, prod at me, but they stay silent.

As I walk away from the Highwind, which has alighted on the top of some hill near Kalm, I wonder what they must think of me. As soon as the airship touched grass, they all leapt from the balcony to the town. The townsfolk erupted in cheers when they looked up above their heads. They saw nothing. Meteor was gone. I wonder if ever before, being able to look up into the sky and seeing nothing would bring tears to their eyes, cries of joy bubbling up from their chests to sporadically burst from their mouths. And they knew they were safe for now. So the partying began. And then my friends, the unknown heroes, quietly slipped into the joy-making. But I kept behind. And here I stay, watching the moon grow rounder and rounder like a ripening apple in the branches of the sky. I almost reach out to pluck it from between the stars until I realize what I am doing. I must be going mad.

I stop walking away and just stare up high.

They probably think I'm just being myself. "Mr. Lone Wolf," Yuffie once teased me, writing me a verbal report card, "Doesn't play well with others." And she's right. I don't. Maybe I did once; once upon a time. But that tale doesn't end happily ever after.

Memories of those time always come back so hurriedly, flooding me so fast that the images fade into colored blobs and I feel sick to my stomach. Just a blur of memories, of science and high hopes; of long soft chestnut hair and the smell of roses. When I was just like everyone else who could laugh and cry and love and bleed. All I can do now is hurt and hurt until I wish I could rip my heart from my chest, but I can't. As much as I want to, through all the times I raised the gun to my head or my chest, all the times I poised my claws over that gentle beating. . . I never could.

I'm such a coward. At the back of my mind I hear the dissent of the foster-demons in my head. Have I really fallen in so deep that even they try to cheer me up?

I've already atoned, I've tied my loose ends. I've paid my debts to all that is good and pure, at least a thousand-fold. And yet I feel no satisfaction. Rather, I feel less satisfied than ever and now there is only emptiness and a sallow sinking in my stomach.

From where I stand in this field of midnight green, I can hear the people laughing. They must be so happy. And I don't know why I am not. Why don't I leap with joy? Why does a gloom hang about me like a yoke upon a beast of burden? All I can do is fold my arms over myself and shiver with misery. As much as I try to convince myself, blind myself, everyone knows exactly where I'll go. The paths I've walked only have one set of footprints. And so my next path is always predetermined to be the same.

My traveling companions, they are not stupid. I'm sure they're expecting me to go, they're wanting me to go, even if only to say "I knew he would." Maybe they think I'll return to Nibelheim, perhaps clean up that filthy Shin-Ra mansion, decked in its cobweb-covered chandeliers and banisters. Maybe they think I'll visit that awful, lonely, beautiful waterfall. Or maybe they think I'll just return to my coffin, where I'll lay there forever until my flesh falls off the bone and I finally belong in a coffin.

Maybe I belong in a coffin anyway. And maybe they're right. I probably will go one of these places. Or maybe all of them. And as I while the time away, agonizing over these trifling decisions, I just watch the moon get rounder and rounder. I know it does not matter where I go. I have trained as a Turk, lived under the most strenuous conditions as part of my job, I've survived vicious experiments performed by a scientist who was trying to play God. But perhaps if I go to that waterfall, or if I go back to Nibelheim, maybe they will come. Maybe they will need me and they'll try to find me. And I'll be able to see their faces again.

When I think like this, I feel so stupid. So hopeful and confused. But still, to wish it makes me smile. Believing it, however, is something I cannot let myself do. It is foolish, it is a false promise to myself. The contentment one finds in daydreams leaves me in the dankness of reality. I pull my cape tight around me and go.

The demons announce their dismay. I don't listen to their individual voices. I just muffle them into submission. I suppose they think I'm poor company. I feel a bit sympathetic, but I have to leave, even if I'm being selfish. A clean cut from my past. That's what I need.

Just moments after I have begun to depart, I hear the soft padding of feet running towards me and I stop. I lower my head and my eyes close. It is Yuffie. No one else can run quite so fast. I feel the beating in my chest get just a little quicker. Soon she is just feet behind me and I can hear her panting and puffing.

"Yuffie," I quietly acknowledge her. I want to smile. Though I find it hard to admit to myself, I wanted to see her again. Just one last time.

"Where are you going, Vinnie?" She is her usual cheery self, but something seems askew. I wonder what I will say. Nibelheim? The waterfall? Home? The last makes me smile. What is home, anyway? To me it is a place I can't recall, just another blur of memories lost to me, even farther than those last moments of my other life. Home... what was it like again? Now all I can remember is a green lawn bathed in sunlight, everything glowing with light as if I were dreaming, and sunflowers everywhere. Am I going home? How can I? I don't have one. I wish I could just laugh or scoff at that. I try to put on a smile, but it just turns into a bitter grimace I keep on my face to keep from screaming. I can't say where I'm going. Even I don't know. So I just keep walking, eyes on the stars.

"Vincent?"

I stop and flinch when she calls me by my real name. I find myself with my eyes on the ground again. She is serious and I don't what I am. Only days ago I held myself so collected, even as the world was coming to an end. But now, with this safety I feel I'm going to fall apart, breaking into shards as I hit the floor, like a porcelain doll.

"Vinnie?" she says, reverting back to my nickname, perhaps because it's more comfortable that way, easier to pretend that this is a time for jokes. I just keep silent. I fear what I might let slip if I open my mouth. This pregnant silence stretches out for some time and she breaks it with her banter.

"We've been partying hard back there," she begins, putting on a smile. "Everyone is singing or dancing or drinking." She pulls me closer by the front of my shirt and whispers in my ear, "I sneaked some beer. No one was paying attention so I just pulled out a little thieving skill." I pull away and give her a discerning look, the one I've used with her so many times. She picks up on it right away and counterattacks, "Just a sip or two! I just wanted to try it." She smirks devilishly and puts her hands behind her back. "Besides, we're supposed to be having fun, right?"

I want to smile, too. I want to chat with her, as if we were just two little people out somewhere in the universe and it didn't matter what I did. But I can't think like that. She believes in the importance of every action we make. And she hit me over the head with that, repeating over and over, "It doesn't matter how many sins you have. Even if you're damned to hell, you can do something to get yourself out." So she told me and so I believe. I guess it really was just hopeful thinking after all. Even now, after all I've done, I just want to sink into the ground and cover myself in the soft dark soil.

I'm so pathetic.

I glance at Yuffie. Her brows are furrowed and her hands twist at the hem of her shirt. She looks at me as if I am lying in a hospital bed. "You okay there, Vinnie?" Her voice is suddenly sober. The rustle of the grass, the merriment of the town, the smell of the wide open field, it all rushes into me and floods back to my senses. I'd withdrawn so far into myself I didn't even see Yuffie standing there in front of me.

"Hm?" I respond to her question to show that I'm awake and back to the present. She smiles. The curve of her lips, the light that shines in her eyes, it makes me want to stay here in this moment forever. And I see that by seeing her again, it makes me hurt so much more. It makes me struggle and flounder in space, though I try hard to come away. I have to leave. I have to. I don't want it to get worse, I don't want to hurt any more than I do now. I don't want to see the others, I can't see their faces, hear their voices.

I don't want to have to break myself apart from each one, ripping apart the threads of our memories, piece by piece. I don't want to be broken.

I take my eyes away from hers and turn away. I start walking. She walks beside me.

"So, Vinnie," she begins, "are you gonna make me guess where you're going?"

I don't answer. I just keep walking, hoping she'll leave me be. Each word is another dagger in me, telling me I don't belong here.

"I bet you're looking for someone from your past, hm? Am I right?"

I shake my head and find myself finally answering her, "Everyone in my past is just that: in the past." I stop to think about this, even though my head feels turbulent as if all my trains of thought were running off the rails and ricocheting off my skull.

"But surely someone. . ."

"All the people I could have gone to are dead. The last one was Lucrecia." I pause. I feel shocked to even have said her name. Lucrecia, with her long hair. As if on cue, a wind gusts past us from the direction of the town, carrying the familiar scent of wine. Like the smell of fruit, but with a harsher more bittersweet edge to it. A scent I took in so often in the presence of Lucrecia, it blends in my memories with the clean scent of her body. When I saw her die at the waterfall, it was to watch the death of my time, the death of an era.

"Not even former Turks?"

I hesitate, and then answer with the abruptness of a military officer calling roll. "Scarlet. Heidegger. ShinRa-"

I stop when I notice Yuffie's mouth drop.

I smile; and then I don't. I enjoy seeing her so flabbergasted. It would be better to forget these things. I'll be leaving soon. "Heidegger heads the military branch," I say matter-of-factly. "He was the fist Turk, the one who started the entire group." I look at her beside me from the corner of my eye. She is in obvious shock. "When I was in the Turks, Scarlet was still an applicant. She could kill efficiently, but ShinRa refused to employ someone so young. But I'm sure she got in. ShinRa probably just waited for her to get a little older."

"And President ShinRa?" Yuffie asks raptly.

"The Turks started once ShinRa began its Electric Company. ShinRa himself was an expert in deception and killing. Heidegger is only the first member to be called a Turk. Originally, ShinRa did all the dirty work himself."

"And how did you know them?"

I reach back as far as I can, as if I'm trying to find the right box in a dark cupboard. "Back then. . . I think we were friends." But I just can't remember. And though they may be dead now, what troubles me most is not that I was involved in their deaths. It's the uncertainty of knowing what I was to them, what they were to me. I can never know now.

"Well, they ended up no good anyways," she adds, trying to be helpful.

I nod. But all she does is cover the wound. Nothing is healed. The scars will always remain.

"But at least you know who your enemies were, right?" She says this with a chuckle, but I can't help my face from darkening. She doesn't realize how she forces the face of my nebulous memories in the dust and when she finally does she looks a bit guilty and sad.

"Well, at least Lucrecia loved you, right?" Yuffie tries to recoup. But what she has said stings scores worse than her other words.

Another hesitant answer. Another pregnant silence. I try to explain. "Lucrecia," I pause, trying to brush the decay of time from my mind, "she did say she loved me." Yes, that's right, but. . . "But she left me for Hojo, for the sake of knowledge. She didn't really love me." I try to force a smile on my face again, but instead my eyebrows push together painfully and I squeeze my eyes shut.

"Well, if she cared more about science than feelings, she wasn't a very good person to be around, I would think."

As she talks so passingly on my past, putting her naive but endearing judgments on everything, it makes me angry. How would she know? Who does she think she is to just trivialize my past with her "insights"? But what makes me the angriest, what makes me want to scream at the sky and sob into the ground at the same time; she's right.

Us, the agents of the ShinRa, Turks and scientists and businessmen, we thought so highly of ourselves. We were going to make the world ours. But what were we after all, but the same scum that rots away this Planet? The scientists that twisted the laws of nature, the businessmen that funded it all. And we Turks thought ourselves so above the street. Yet we were just the same as the gangs below, killers, murderers, dressing up our sorrows in smart blue suits. And Lucrecia and I? Two nothings who thought we knew what love was. All of us, such a sorry lot.

I look into Yuffie's face and it's open. I don't know what to see anymore, don't know what I want to see. Everything is just too overwhelming. Time to leave it all behind?

"Vincent," Yuffie says. I nod. "I came here to tell you that I'm not here to watch you off. I'm not going to wish you a good trip, a nice life somewhere far off."

I nod again and I turn my back on her for what I pray is that last time. My head is hanging and I hope she doesn't know I want nothing more than to take off into the night and drown in the darkness.

"No one's here to say goodbye. That's what I came out here to tell you."

My face is burning and my eyes still sting even though I'm shutting them as tight as I can. Damn it. Damn it. Why does it even matter? Why do I even care?

"So that's all? We're all going to leave, one by one until everyone's gone their separate ways?" My voice is a bit shaky and so low she can't hear me.

I look up into the stars and wonder when they'll finally fall from the sky and bury this world six feet under. When can I stop caring and wave goodbye? I listen inside and even my officious demons have no solid advice. They watch me with, almost protectively, in argument over what I must do. But in the midst of their tug-of-war, I hear the voice of Chaos, with crystal clarity, telling me to leave. I have to leave. I can't take this anymore.

I turn away and I break away from her face.

"Vincent!" Her voice seems urgent and sincere, but it just cuts me now. "Tell me where you're going! You can't go back to Lucrecia's waterfall or Nibelheim, just to rot in your coffin; I won't let you!"

And I just can't hear her anymore.

And I just wish I didn't care.

And I.

Just.

Snap.

I yell. I scream. "What do you want from me!" I growl. I cry. "I know that no one cares about where I'm going, who I am! I know!" And my voice just gets louder and louder. "You tell me no one cares if I leave, but you won't let me! What am I supposed to do! Sit here and wait while you rub my face into the past!"

Louder into preternatural decibels and I can't bring myself down, something inside me is broken. My vision blacks out and I raise my head up, damning the sky and the heavens, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow! They just keep coming. When will you end it?" I'm screaming and panting at the stars, "Just hurry up and fall!"

And I'm finally able to stop. And I'm almost to tears for the first time in decades. And I'm shocked by myself. Repulsed by myself. And when I look over at Yuffie, and see her crouched over, hands over her ears, cowering away from me, I step back away from her and I sink even lower.

Oh God, why can't I just fall into oblivion? I'm so ashamed to see her so sincerely afraid of me and I'm suddenly disgusted with myself and the gap between myself and humanity. And my back doesn't stay straight, and I hold my gauntlet arm close to me, ashamed it's even there. It's the reminder that tells her I'm not human, not anymore, even if I suppress my demons until my face turns blue.

And I just keep backing away. And she looks up at me and I want to shatter into a million pieces of stardust, but I know I can never be something so pure as that. I'll only be me. Vincent Valentine - neither human nor demon, an animal that has no name in the logs of heaven.

I'm Vincent Valentine. I'm. . .

Then she rushes to me and buries her face in my chest, throwing her arms about me, repeating over and over, "You're not a monster. You're not a monster." And I wish I could believe her but I just hold her numbly.

"You're just so damn pessimistic," she mumbles into my chest. "You misunderstood me." She pulls away and looks up at me. "No one is going to watch you go. Because we won't let you leave. We can't let you leave us."

And in an instant, the world seems to play a tiny tune, twinkling ly a music box, and all the gears and mechanisms seems to fit, and the melody is complete. I really have nothing to say to her, I don't know what to say anymore.

All the fireworks start bursting in the night, greens and reds and blues reflecting in her hair as she leads me along. And I totter after, while the night seems to turn into a climax of crying violins. My heart feels like it might burst, but this time it's a good feeling and it's all I can think about. We stand at the top of the hill overlooking the cheering town of Kalm.

I don't care anymore about the past, I realize. I have the present and the future to keep me company and all those memories, decayed into dust are blasted away. And I'm okay. It's time to let it all go. Maybe I can still be happy.

We're heading over to where the rest are, Cloud and Tifa and all of them, she tells me. Then Yuffie takes me by the hand and pulls me home. Yes; home. That sounds perfectly right.

End

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A/N: I know, I know, you're probably thinking that Vincent was really OOC, but hey. He was at his breaking point. He can't really be Mr.Calm and Collected every single second of the day, right? Review and tell me what you think. Thanks for reading! 


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